Directions: Select any single
literary work (poem, short story, novel, drama, or film) related to our
“Imaginary Worlds” course theme (suggested works appear below) on which
to base your final literary analysis/synthesis essay.

Specific Guidelines

Provide an expressive introduction: what led you to choose the
work and how do you believe it relates to our “Imaginary Worlds” course
theme? Do not summarize the literary work.

Enhance your perspective of the work by extensively
comparing/contrasting it with one or more of the works we studied OR by
researching information that deepens your understanding of some aspect
of the work that you find interesting. Choose one or more of the
following suggestions to help you arrive at a synthesis angle for your
subject:

Explore the writer’s biography: find facts relating to the
author’s life and relate them to the work

Explore some detail relating to the subject matter or theme of
the work in greater depth or currency

Explore some aspect of the surrounding social context and relate
it to the work

Compare/contrast the work you chose with another literary work we
haven’t studied (i.e., a work by another author or even by the same
author that explores a similar theme, form, etc.)

Apply a theory from another discipline (sociological or
psychological analysis, Marxism, feminism, quantum physics, whatever!)
to some aspect of the literary work (an interpretation of character,
for example).

Provide an analysis of the text that examines one or more its key
features (i.e., its characters, themes, motifs, symbolic or allegorical
meanings, etc.)

Provide an expressive conclusion: what relevance does this work
have for contemporary readers? For you? Why do you think readers might
be interested in it?

Suggested
Works by Genre

POETRY or MYTHIC TALE
Mythic tale (any culture)
Odysseus’ trip to the underworld in the Odyssey by Homer
Another tale(s) from Ovid’s Metamorphosis
Virgil’s trip to the underworld in Book VI of the Aeneid
An excerpt from Purgatorio or Paradiso by Dante
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner or Cristabel or Kubla Khan by Samuel
Taylor Coleridge
The Lady of Shallot by Alfred Lord Tennyson

SHORT FICTION
Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
In the Penal Colony by Franz Kafka
The Birthmark by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Black Cat by Edgar Allen Poe
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K. LeGuin

DRAMA
Happy Days by Samuel Beckett
No Exit by Jean Paul Sartre
Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello
The Bald Soprano or Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco

NOVEL
1984 by George Orwell
Alice in Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathon Swift
Grendel by John Gardner
The Time Machine or War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
A Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Paradise by Toni Morrison
A Woman on the Edge of Time by Margaret Atwood
2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis
Any sci-fi novel by Phillip K. Dick
Any sci-fi novel by Ray Bradbury
Any sci-fi novel by Robert A. Heinlein
The Dispossessed or any sci-fi novel by Ursula K. LeGuin
A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter Miller
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

FILM
Big Fish
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Brazil
A Clockwork Orange
The Truman Story
Pleasantville
Planet of the Apes or The Omega Man
BladeRunner
Fahrenheit 451
The Lord of the Flies
The Matrix
Star Wars
The Lord of the Rings